Empress Dowager Cixi Quotes
Isn’t it the case that foreigners always want money?
The Empress at that time had never interacted with Westerners as Chinese culture regarded them as barbarians and it would be an insult to the Empress to even be in their presence. All she knew of the British was what her nobles had reported to her. A British army, under General “Chinese” Charles Gordon had been assigned by London to aid the Chinese Government to suppress the Taiping Rebellion, which it did. The Empress began to see for herself some of the behavior of the British—see {641821} and was developing and independent view of the foreign barbarians. After Gordon was successful in defeating the rebels, the Empress ordered that he be rewarded with 10,000 silver Taels—a small fortune. Her commanding general who had offered the reward had to report that Gordon refused stating that he was not a mercenary but a general commanding British Forces in service to Queen Victoria. Cixi was not only impressed by Gordon’s integrity and loyalty to his country, but was beginning to learn that the “facts” about the foreigners had not been reported accurately.
Cixi, 1835–1908, Empress Dowager of China, Question asked of Earl Li Hongzhang ~1863
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation illustrates an interesting characteristic of the British colonial military. The British military, under “Chinese Gordon” were assigned to help the government of the Empress Cixi put down a The Taiping Rebellion. However, the British army used just enough force to achieve the military objective, and would take prisoners and kill as few Chinese as possible. This was unsatisfactory to Earl Li who wanted all the rebels killed. His forces were not strong enough or brave enough to beat the rebels, but they were very adept at slaughtering defeated soldiers and their followers and supporters. Li, like most of the Chinese elite at the time, placed very little value on individual Chinese lives. However the fact that Gordon and his men did value individual Chinese lives highly impressed the Empress who was intent on modernizing China against the wishes of most of her court and nobility.
Empress Dowager Cixi was a Chinese empress dowager and regent who was the de facto supreme ruler of China in the late Qing dynasty for 47 years, from 1861 until her death in 1908. Of the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, she was elected as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor in her adolescence and gave birth to a son, Zaichun, in 1856. After the Xianfeng Emperor's death in 1861, the young boy became the Tongzhi Emperor, and she became the Empress Dowager. Cixi ousted a group of regents appointed by the late emperor and assumed regency, which she shared with Empress Dowager Ci'an. Cixi then consolidated control over the dynasty when she installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor at the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875, contrary to the traditional rules of succession of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China since 1644.
